Family Literacy Classes Open Doors to Healthy Households

She tells her kids daily: Don’t be like me.

She dropped out of eighth grade. Lives in a cruddy apartment, on welfare, all her rings long since lost to the pawnshop.

Worst is the shame: She can’t help her sixth-grade daughter with math homework because she doesn’t know fractions. She has trouble spelling. Her grammar is bad. Reading can be a chore. At 32, she looks back and concludes: “I didn’t do nothing with my life.”

Tracy Scarberry is determined that her children won’t feel the same. And she now has help keeping them on track. The concept is called family literacy, but it reaches far beyond the ABCs. It attempts to break the dismal, predictable cycle of dropout parents raising dropout children--by getting both generations excited about learning together. And, despite mixed results, it’s fast gaining converts nationwide.

Federal funding for family literacy has soared from $15 million in 1989 to $250 million this year. About 6,000 programs have sprung up around the country. California held its biggest-ever convention on family literacy in Los Angeles last week. Pennsylvania State University earlier this year chartered the first institute for research into family literacy. And President Bush, whose mother helped found the National Council for Family Literacy, is expected to expand the program.

Family literacy offers parents basic education in reading, writing and math, with the goal of nudging them toward high school equivalency diplomas. Adults also take regular parenting classes.

But the most important component--and the one unique to family literacy--is “together time,” a chance for instructors to model the kind of attentive parenting that helps kids to succeed.

It might take the form of an evening pajama party where teachers demonstrate how to read stories aloud. Or it could be a play-and-learn art class where parents help their toddlers mold clay. Some instructors make home visits, bringing along educational toys and showing moms how to use them with their children. The most intensive programs invite parents to their children’s classrooms so both generations learn the same lessons side by side.

In California, family literacy is often tailored to cultural groups. Native Americans, for instance, learn to use their traditions of storytelling to boost their children’s literacy. And the state funds a school-based program that teaches immigrant parents English--then shows them how to use those skills to help their children read.

“Many parents don’t realize how important their role as their children’s teacher is,” said Barbara Van Horn, director of the Penn State institute.

The first family literacy program was developed in Kentucky in 1985, and the state continues to push the model hard as a solution to its woeful dropout rate. Kentucky for years ranked last in the nation in high school graduation rates. (It finally edged up last year to third-worst.) Ed Ford, the governor’s education policy advisor, grumbles that the state has yet to “cultivate an appreciation for education.”

A total of 14% of Kentucky’s working-age adults are functionally illiterate. An additional 27% have minimal skills; they may struggle to understand simple texts, to read maps, to add and subtract.

Those numbers are actually slightly better than the national average. But the national statistics include millions of immigrants who are not fluent in English. (In California, for instance, 24% of adults perform at the lowest literacy level--but an estimated three-fifths of them are not native English speakers.) In Kentucky, the problem is home-grown. Generations of adults knew they could get work in the coal mines without high school diplomas. So there was little stigma in dropping out.

The result: In 19 Kentucky counties, mostly in hard-up Appalachia, more than half the adults perform at the lowest two levels on literacy tests. That means they cannot use a bus schedule. Cannot write a letter explaining an error on a credit card bill. Cannot figure out, even with a calculator, how much they would save in a sale.

Those struggles resonate here in Ashland, a drooping city of 27,000 in far northeastern Kentucky. Here, Angie Pennington quit writing her cousins in embarrassment over her grammar. Here, Cecilia McKnight found reading so hard that she put off her dream of opening a restaurant and took a dead-end job scheduling nurses that required her to read only names and times of day.

Here too, as indeed across the state, many low-income parents can sketch family trees full of dropouts. Take Scarberry: Both her parents left school. So did three of her four siblings. She was 16 when she decided she had learned quite enough. “They should have taken me to school and tied me in the chair,” she says now, ferocious with regret.

Family literacy is supposed to turn families like the Scarberrys around. But there’s been little conclusive research on how effective the program is compared with other approaches. However, the raw numbers look good: Both adults and children enrolled in family literacy make modest, but measurable, gains on standardized tests. And many programs boast considerable success in pushing adults toward the high school general equivalency diploma, or GED.

Yet when researchers compared family literacy with other educational models, they found that adults in a control group notched similar gains on academic tests. The same pattern emerged among children: Kids in family literacy improved their vocabularies dramatically--but so did children in a control group.

Family literacy seems to score its most impressive success in the home. Parents make big gains on a test that measures the intellectual stimulation and emotional support they give their children. They also show significant improvement in exposing their kids to books and magazines. Control groups can’t match either stride.

Here in Ashland, 23-year-old Jennifer Comer learned from family literacy that she has to structure her toddler’s time, not just let him “flop down on the couch and watch TV,” as she herself did nearly every day before dropping out of 11th grade.

Then there’s 30-year-old Cecilia McKnight. A year in family literacy brought her reading skills up from a sixth- to a 12th-grade level and gave her the confidence to enroll in the culinary arts program at the local college last year. Her grades so far: all A’s.

Family literacy taught her as well to interact with her baby, Mya. McKnight has two older children, 8 and 10, but she never much played with them when they were little. After Mya was born, a parent educator came to her home twice a month and showed her how to work on puzzles and build block towers with the baby. McKnight learned how to read to Mya too, how to ask questions and point out interesting pictures even before the baby could talk. They’re simple steps, but educators insist they’re the key to snapping the dropout cycle.

“The literacy content of the home is absolutely critical to the long-term success of the child,” said Ron Pugsley, director of literacy programs for the U.S. Department of Education. “That means more than just the presence of books. It’s the ability of the parents to use them with their children.”

Follow-up studies of children enrolled in family literacy show that 80% or more score at least as well as their peers on measures such as school attendance, classroom behavior, motivation to learn and family support for education. The trick is in getting families to enroll in the literacy programs, and to keep them coming.

In Ashland, for instance, just one-third of the 36 enrolled families attend class regularly--even though most are required to as a condition of receiving welfare. They skip because they’re battling addiction, depression or domestic violence. Children get sick. Cars break down. Or they don’t see the need to learn fractions.

Kentucky’s leaders hope to punch through such indifference with a $1-million publicity campaign pushing the message “Education Pays.” They’re also giving tax breaks to employers who help workers go back to school. Through such incentives, they hope to double participation in adult education by 2004.